It seems somehow sacrilegious to admit that for me, the most emotional experience at this year's Cannes film festival – a neophile event predicated on premieres, discoveries, revelations – has been the screening of a 61-year-old film.
But then, The Red Shoes, an astonishingly inventive story of a young woman's struggle to become a great dancer, is my favourite movie. I love with a pounding passion every frame of this film. Even the opening sequence (in which hordes of students leap up the stairs to the balcony at the Royal Opera House, and the new music fans hotly argue with the balletomanes about the work they are about to see) sets me off. This is a story about loving art, about living and breathing it. It is about the joy, camaraderie and discipline (and fear, and pain) of making it. It is a supremely creative act about the act of creation. No wonder Martin Scorsese says that watching it, aged nine, was the most important formative experience in his life.
The Powell and Pressburger masterpiece was unveiled on Friday evening in a newly restored version, an act of conservation behind which Scorsese has been been a driving force. I had never seen The Red Shoes on the big screen, leave alone like this. The restoration is stupendous. Its director of photography, the late Jack Cardiff, was a stickler for colour – he even, according to the man sitting next to me at the screening, mixed his own house paint.
The colours of the restored Red Shoes absolutely leap from the screen. Moira Shearer is all icy skin, palely freckled. And then there is her hair, that miraculous sheet of red-gold fire. As she walks towards the Royal Opera House in an early scene, that vivid shade is visually echoed by a bunch of amber chrysanthemums from the flower market briefly seen at the front of the shot. Then, dramatically backlit during the extended, surrealistic scene in which she dances the ballet The Red Shoes, it suddenly flames a shocking scarlet.
There are a couple of scenes on the railway station at Monte Carlo, and the restoration shows us just how carefully they were made – a woman in a crimson coat here, a burst of purest blue delphiniums there. Dressed in a cloud of tulle in a shade somewhere between peacock and ocean green, Shearer mounts the steps of a Monte Carlo villa, the sky hotly Mediterranean, transformed into a kind of sea goddess. Imagine you possess a faded, tattered photograph of someone you love, and then, quite unexpectedly, you see them again, solid, living and breathing. That was what watching the restored Red Shoes felt like.
The good news is that the restored Red Shoes is released on Blu-ray and DVD by ITV on 29 June – and the BFI are even thinking of doing a special "wear red shoes for The Red Shoes" screening later in the year.
Charlotte Higgins
The Guardian (UK)
Las zapatillas rojas (The Red Shoes, 1948, Michael Powell y Emeric Pressburger)
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Las zapatillas rojas (The Red Shoes, 1948, Michael Powell y Emeric Pressburger)
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Iniciado por Toby Dammit
... a ver si sale algún conejillo de indias. Porque tengo ganas de ver esta peli en condiciones.
.. 
¿subtítulos bajos? ¿Se comen frases? ..
